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SCAPEGOAT

THE JEWS, ISRAEL, AND WOMEN'S LIBERATION

This deplorable piece of man-hating propaganda ultimately does a disservice to women as well. Inciting them to violence...

Feminist writer Dworkin (Life and Death, 1997, etc.) exploits a common analogy between the inferior status of diaspora Jews and women to highlight the function of both groups as scapegoats.

Dworkin draws on an extensive bibliography to demonstrate how, for thousands of years, marginalized groups have been systematically abused, violated, and deprived of human dignity. Her sources, however, seem to be used pell-mell and quoted out of context. Even worse, when Dworkin speaks in her own words, she frequently exhibits an ignorance of many of the subjects (from Jewish law to social conditions in Russia) most relevant to her argument. Her tendentious narrative rapidly deteriorates into a one-sided, angst-filled generalization of Dworkin’s own bitter personal feelings (rooted in her experience as a battered woman). As a result, she ends up committing the very sin she seeks to expose, “scapegoating” all men for all injustice in every period of history. She declares, for example, that it is degrading for a woman to hear the words “I love you” from a man, because these words are “a sign of appropriation.” The reader is left to wonder whether men should be equally insulted by women’s declarations of love. Furthermore, Dworkin completely ignores the force of the female libido, instead portraying women as passive prey to men’s desire. Both pornography and high art depicting the female form are declared equally hostile to women, with no attention paid to paintings and statues of nude men or the purely aesthetic value of the human body. Dworkin even advocates sending Israeli women to the front lines for the sake of her cherished principle of equality.

This deplorable piece of man-hating propaganda ultimately does a disservice to women as well. Inciting them to violence against men, Dworkin contributes to furthering the rift between the sexes, making the dream of a truly humane society based on mutual respect as elusive as ever.

Pub Date: June 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-684-83612-2

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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